Baby simulators make teens think twice about starting families

Somewhere between a 4 a.m. feeding and a 5:30 a.m. diaper change, Quincy Cooper decided he wasn't ready to be a dad.

"It was a lot harder than I thought it would be," Cooper, 16, said.

And that's exactly what his teacher Cheri Mendoza hopes her Foothill High School students learn while caring for baby simulators as part of a child development class.

High schools across the country have been using different methods over the years to give students insight into the difficulties of teenage parenthood.

Teachers used to assign students to care for eggs and bags of flour in lieu of babies. Then, in 1993, an out-of-work aerospace worker invented a crying doll called Baby Think It Over as a more realistic alternative.